Sunday, January 22, 2017

Why is there Something rather than Nothing?

Why is there something—anything at all—when there could have
been just nothing? The early modern philosopher Leibniz first posed this
question, which Grünbaum, a philosopher of science, recently called the
Primordial Existential Question. But what exactly is this question asking?

The question’s initial context is Leibniz’s cosmological argument for God’s existence. That argument is essentially that the Principle of
Sufficient Reason demands an ultimate explanation that naturalistic science can’t
offer. Reason cries out for a metaphysical explanation of all existence, not
just for causal explanations which posit one contingent thing or state of the
world to account for something equally contingent. Such partial explanations
can never be fully satisfying, since if the series of natural things is
infinite and so every part of the world is adequately explained in terms of
some other part which causes it, one question yet remains to be answered: why
is there anything in the first place, rather than nothing at all? The whole of
nature must be understood in terms of something unnatural, some necessary being
that lies outside the causal chain. That necessary being is supposed to be God.

The standard, logical response to this argument is that it
commits the fallacy of composition. Just because something applies to a part
doesn’t mean it applies to the whole; just because finite, contingent phenomena
are usefully explained by positing causal relations between them, doesn’t mean
the whole universe which contains all those phenomena as its parts is just as
usefully explained as being an effect of some cause, a product of a necessary
being. Causal explanations are inductive in that they’re based on our many
experiences of regularities that hold in the interactions between finite,
contingent things. You eat a hot dog, the mustard spills and lands on your
shirt, staining it. The one event causes the other, under the right
circumstances. But we occupy only one universe and haven’t even once
experienced the whole of it. So the metaphysical or theological account that
the whole of nature must be produced by a supernatural being isn’t as reliable an
explanation as an inductive one of a pattern connecting some parts of the
natural whole.

This response, though, amounts to little more than casting
aspersions on Leibniz’s argument, since the response is consistent with
Leibniz’s main point. The whole point is that scientific, probabilistic
explanations are limited to the finite and contingent parts of the world, but that
reason in general can ask a further, metaphysical question. The issue, then, is
whether reason extends beyond science or reliable, probabilistic, quantifying, experience-based
logic. If we think of reasoning pragmatically, interpreting reason as the more
or less useful tinkering with mental models, we needn’t discount metaphysics or
even theology because it’s not a branch of modern science. True, just because we can ask a speculative question doesn’t mean we
can reason usefully about possible answers to it. Still, the point about
the fallacy of composition begs this deeper question. The typical critic of the
cosmological proof scientistically dismisses the metaphysical question of
whether the entire causal chain making up the natural universe’s history is
itself something that could be
explained at all and would be
explained only by positing something supernatural. Certainly, just because causal
explanations work in one context, doesn’t mean they work in another. We have no
experience of other universes, so we don’t know why one would have resulted
rather than another; we have no objective basis for assigning probabilities to
something compared to nothing, so we don’t know whether without God there
should have been nothing at all, because nothingness is supposedly simpler than
a natural series of causes and effects. This is all true, but is so only as far
as it goes. Again, we have no empirical grounds
for speaking with precision about being or of nonbeing in general. We haven’t
quantified such entities and we can’t run experiments to test hypotheses
concerning them. But this doesn’t mean a metaphysical question about natural
things in general is irrational or irresponsible.

Theism Betrays the Metaphysical Inkling

Mind you, Leibniz’s
theistic construal of this “necessary being” doesn’t inspire confidence that
the metaphysical question is worthwhile, after all. His anthropocentrism
begins with the so-called Principle of Sufficient Reason, “that nothing takes
place without a sufficient reason; in other words, that nothing occurs for
which it would be impossible for someone who has enough knowledge of things to
give a reason adequate to determine why the thing is as it is and not otherwise”
(Leibniz, PNG, 1714). This implies that
nothing can exist unless it can be potentially understood by a sentient being.
This principle is psychological, not metaphysical, since it expresses our
hubris and fear of death which drive us to posit a deity to glorify ourselves
who are invariably said to be made to resemble that deity. The antihumanism of
what H.P. Lovecraft called the cosmicist perspective shows there’s an
alternative. Not only need the world not answer to the creatures that happen to
evolve within it, but this asymmetry should have a devastating impact on our comfort
level.

In fact, the anthropocentrism extends to Leibniz’s notion of
truth-as-adequacy (as correspondence or agreement). He assumes that something’s
proper arrangement is to be related to a truth-teller, since truth is when a
statement agrees with a fact, and this adequacy can’t be merely subjective or
dependent on the teller’s purpose. Suppose, on the contrary, we say that truth
is just a statement’s usefulness in achieving a goal of the person who makes
the statement. Now suppose we’re confronted with something that really defies
comprehension, such as an alien artifact. If the Principle of Sufficient Reason
is to be understood pragmatically, in line with our supposition, Leibniz’s
point becomes trivial since we could always belittle some phenomenon, reducing
it to human terms to preserve the illusion that we understand what’s happening.
That is, we could formulate a theory that suffices
to achieve our goals. For example, the alien artifact might actually or
originally be a weapon that could destroy the universe, but a human fashion
designer could get hold of the object and surmise that it’s a work of art, so
she hangs it in an art gallery. The statement that the object is a sculpture
(rather than a weapon of mystifying potency) becomes true, but only because
truth itself becomes largely subjective, a meeting in the middle between what
the world shows us, and how we’d prefer the world to be. Leibniz and other
rationalist philosophers don’t think of truth as being so trivial, so the
agreement between symbols and fact must be objective for them.

The question, then, is whether in using our symbols to make
our statements weagree with the facts or the facts
thereby to some extent agree with us.
For Leibniz, God created the best of all possible worlds, and rational
understanding of the world by creatures is part of that plan, so truth is a
statement’s helping to fulfill this underlying, supernatural purpose. For
Plato, another rationalist philosopher, there’s an abstract, immaterial order
which is metaphysically close to the good, beautiful, and eternal source of all
beings (to the God of the Philosophers), and our objective, existential purpose
is to transcend our gross materiality, to look past the illusions generated by
the prison of our animal bodies, and to comprehend that source. Both
metaphysical pictures give us too much credit, although Leibniz’s is egregious
in this regard. Plato might say our statements are in some sense material
copies of copies that are far removed from ultimate reality, but in attributing
that reality with goodness and beauty, Plato nevertheless humanizes it so that
the adequacy or truth relation becomes symmetrical. Our task is to transcend
material illusions and approach reality so that we might more nearly agree with
it, but in so far as this reality is personalized, ultimate reality must in
turn agree with the best in us, and that’s a piece of anthropocentrism.
Leibniz’s god is more elaborately personalized, so that the metaphysical
structure (monads, best of all possible worlds, theism and intelligent design,
etc.) that lends objectivity to the epistemic relation between adequate symbols
and facts likewise makes nature accountable to minds.

Any such anthropocentrism is now known to be naive. For those with intellectual integrity, cosmicism
is part of the default philosophical position after the Scientific Revolution.
When we issue statements that we think of usefully as being accurate
representations of how things are, those facts of the matter are perfectly
indifferent to us, as it were. Their essence isn’t just inhuman; it’s also virtually
inscrutable, as demonstrated by the extreme counterintuitiveness of quantum
mechanics which is the deepest-available exploration of that essence. The world
begins to answer to us only when we modify it with our technology, creating
artificial worlds (languages, fictions, cultures, societies, cities)
that do indeed flatter us by making us central to them as the agents that
assign the artifacts the functions that provide their purpose. Nature itself
needn’t agree with us, meaning that it needn’t satisfy our expectations or be
limited to what we can comprehend. To think otherwise is to fail to grow up.

Of course, Leibniz could say that this begs the question,
since the cosmological argument is supposed to establish that nature as a whole
makes sense only on the assumption that it has a personal creator. But as Kant
observed, the rationalist establishes no such thing because there’s no need to
assume the cosmically necessary being is a personal deity. On the contrary, any
personification of something supposedly unnatural illicitly naturalizes that
entity. For example, if this eternal, immaterial, ultimate reality has a mind,
it must have thoughts and feelings, and the order of those mental states should
form a coherent whole so that we could explain why one of the deity’s thoughts
follows logically or emotionally from another. In that case, God’s realm would
be psychologically continuous with nature—which is just what’s assumed when the
theist says God made rational creatures in his image. Thus, the creation of
nature wouldn’t be a supernatural event, since God would be creating an
artifact for a reason just like we do.

The Oneness of Supernatural Being and Nothingness

When the theist
declines to indulge in personifying the First Cause, to preserve the coherence
of her cosmology, she’s left with the implication that this necessary being is
equivalent to nothing. The idea is that all things we know of, including
persons, are natural and can be used to explain each other only so far until we
ask for an explanation of why there’s anything at all rather than nothing.
Since something can’t come from nothing by itself, some other type of being had
to actualize the world we have, which is why there’s not nothing. But there’s no non-silly description of that
supernatural being. Indeed, “nothing” applies to both the potent First
Cause and to nonbeing, in that neither consists of finite, contingent things.
The difference is supposed to be that there’s a metaphysical level of
understanding the necessary being, whereas with absolute nothingness there’s
nothing to understand on any level. But we’ve just confirmed the illegitimacy
of literalistic personification of the necessary being, so that on a mystical
view of this supernatural cosmology, the necessary being becomes as
inexplicable as absolute nothingness. There’s
exactly as much magic in nature being begotten from nothingness as there is in nature
issuing from an impersonal, unnatural “being” about which nothing can be meaningfully
said.

The necessity of this First Cause is supposed to follow from
the Principle of Sufficient Reason, since reason demands that all contingent
things be caused by something not itself contingent, in which case this
supernatural thing must have its own reason for existing so that it doesn’t depend
on anything else; otherwise, this cause of nature would be just another part of
nature. But the same can be said about absolute nonbeing. Nothingness is just
as supernatural as God, assuming that nature can’t be produced from nothing
alone, nor can nature turn into absolute nothingness. So nothingness is hardly
just another contingent, finite thing that depends on something for why it is
the way it is, such as for why it lacks any positive attribute. Pure nonbeing,
then, should be just as metaphysically necessary as the vacuously-powerful
necessary being that’s hastily construed as God. The necessity of either is
entirely negative in that the necessity consists of this entity’s difference
from the contingency of natural things. Both the
necessary-being-mistaken-for-God and pure nonbeing differ from any particular
thing in the universe in that respect, and once we strip away the illusion of
theistic understanding of the former, the two might as well be the same, for
all we can say or fathom.

The rationalist theologian might say at this point that of
course the necessary being and nothingness are different, since only the latter
precludes the existence of nature. Pure nothingness can’t be anywhere, nor can
pure nothingness have ever been, since we know there’s a universe here that
actually includes myriad things within it. But our universe of contingent
things might coexist with a more positively-construed supernatural being or with
a metaphysical structure that subsists beyond the natural dimensions. However,
I don’t think this response takes us far. The upshot is supposed to be that
nothingness would be omnipresent, so that if something comes from what’s called
nonbeing, that initial state couldn’t have been absolutely empty after all. If
pure nonbeing were supposedly outside
the confines of our universe, that so-called nonbeing would have special properties
since it would be spatially related to us, and so it wouldn’t be entirely
empty. Pure nonbeing would be permanent, eternal and everywhere, and it would
make anything else impossible. (And so a deity would have been needed to decide
between creating something other than him, leaving him as the only thing, or
committing deicide to let absolute nothingness reign forever.)

Notice, though, that once again the same is said about God.
God, too, is supposed to be omnipresent and eternal, which leads many theists
to suspect that nature is an illusion, that only God is ultimately real. So
both positive and negative metaphysically-necessary or simple beings, the
typically-personified First Cause or pure nothingness should preclude the
reality of a universe of finite, contingent things. If any timeless,
supernatural order is real, nature should be illusory and unreal, whether that
higher order is worthy of being anthropomorphized or is more despairingly
thought of as being utterly empty of being. In fact, from our perspective as
metaphysically-independent, finite beings, a supernatural order could seem
either godlike or wholly empty, since the difference would speak only to how we
choose to project our preoccupations onto something that would be entirely
alien to us. The self-sustaining First Cause, construed as nothingness, would
seem empty to us because we would have no way to positively differentiate it
from anything else; we could say only that it’s not any particular thing we
know of, which leaves us with exactly nothing (with no thing).

This equality of godlike supernatural being and pure
nothingness shows up in scientific cosmology. In quantum mechanics, nothingness
is construed as a quantum field that includes zero particles. This is the
vacuum state or zero-point (particle) field that has the lowest possible
energy. It’s as close to nothing as physical things can get, and yet Heisenberg’s
Uncertainty Principle implies that this vacuum wouldn’t be entirely empty, but
would be filled with zillions of virtual particles as the field fluctuates. The
vacuum would be structured by possibilities, namely by the superpositions of
these virtual particles that very rapidly pop into and out of being. Likewise,
in Relativity Theory, the universe originated from an infinitely dense and hot point
called a gravitational singularity. Both the quantum field and the singularity
have supernatural properties: the virtual particles are ghostlike and divinely
creative, giving birth to infinite universes according to the Eternal Inflation
model of the Big Bang, and the posited singularity isn’t subject to laws of
nature. And yet the vacuum state is treated as the physical equivalent of
nothingness, while the singularity is likewise no particular thing.
Nonpersonified but positively-construed supernatural being, such as the vacuum
state of the quantum field or the gravitational singularity, can each be
conceived of negatively, as nothingness, by a gestalt switch of conception.

But neither physical description of how being could have
come from nonbeing provides for an answer to the eerie metaphysical question of
why there’s something rather than nothing. Physicists like Lawrence Krauss would
say this is because

When we ask, ‘Why?’ we usually mean ‘How? If we can answer
the latter, that generally suffices for our purposes. For example, we might
ask: ‘Why is the Earth 93 million miles from the Sun?’ but what we really
probably mean is, ‘How is the Earth 93 million miles from the Sun?’ That is, we
are interested in what physical processes led to the Earth ending up in its
present position. ‘Why’ implicitly suggests purpose, and when we try to
understand the solar system in scientific terms, we do not generally ascribe
purpose to it. (A Universe from Nothing)

The problem, though,
is that if “Why?” questions presuppose purpose, as Krauss says, “How?”
questions presuppose mechanism. Thus, neither sort of question is useful in
grappling with the metaphysical conundrum at hand. Asking why there’s something rather than nothing will lead to a theistic
answer, which answer would have only subjective value. But asking how something could have come from
nothing would require that the initial state of nonbeing be quantified and that
various natural laws be presupposed (such as the Uncertainty Principle) so that
pure, wholly unnatural nothingness, being equivalent to that which could be
easily mistaken for God, would likewise not be in view on this physical
approach to the metaphysical question. The
metaphysical something and nothing aren’t like the theistic or the
physical versions of them.

The Metaphysical Question is Cosmicist

What, then, is really being asked by the metaphysical question?
The something at issue is any possible particular thing, and the nothing is
some “thing” other of which we have
no easy conception. The question is whether natural causality goes on forever
or whether nature begins from something else,
something unnatural and thus potentially divine or nonphysical. We err, then, in trying to explain that transition, since we either
personify or instrumentalize the supernatural starting point. That’s
because our two predominant forms of explanation fall back on our instincts
either for interpreting each other’s minds or for surviving by positing
mechanisms which can be controlled by our tools. (As Krauss says, answering the
“How?” question “suffices for our purposes,” the latter being instrumental ones,
meaning those that are wise in a progressive, capitalistic society.) Both sorts
of explanation are things that mere humans would offer, whereas the
metaphysical question demands that we lay aside our humanity and imagine a
scenario that isn’t in our interest. “How
could any natural thing have come from something unnatural?” is just as
incoherent as “Why is there any
natural thing rather than nothing at all—unless a deity chose to create nature?”
The scientist’s question would betray the hypothetical unnaturalness of the
starting point by positing some mechanism, since “How?” assumes methodological
naturalism. And the theist’s question likewise betrays the otherness of that
starting point, by projecting familiar mentality onto it.

The metaphysical
question is better felt than asked. We know from experience that the
universe is full of one type of being: the natural, finite, contingent type. For
that reason we experience myriad transformations within nature: physical things
of various subtypes become other subtypes of physical things. For example, the
seasons change and living things die, becoming one with the earth. By analogy,
then, we wonder whether all of nature is likewise the result of something
different from any natural thing. We can’t easily describe that transformation,
but we suspect that because the pre-natural being wouldn’t be bound by natural
limitations, such as space or time, it could be present throughout the world in
mysterious ways, perhaps reducing natural being to the status of being an
illusion, as I said. To wonder whether
nature generally proceeds from non-nature is to feel that the universe may not
be as natural as we assume.

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In this blog you'll find my philosophical rants within the undead god. What on earth is the "undead god," you ask, and why do I rant within it? Read on and find out or just look at how the planet and all of nature mindlessly evolve, setting the stage for our existential predicament. In the big picture, who I am doesn't matter at all and when I write here I write mostly with the big picture in mind. But if you're curious about some of my interests, see my blogger profile.